Lena Dunham’s SXSW Emerging Visions entry Creative Nonfiction is exactly that — an Emerging Vision. It’s the early and somewhat unformed work of a clearly ambitious artist (22 year-old Dunham wrote, directed and stars in a dual role in the film, which was shot on video and 16mm over the course of several years, beginning when she was a junior at Oberlin College and making extensive use of that school’s dorm rooms as sets) who seems to know what she wants to say, which is something of a feat in itself. If she doesn’t quite manage to actually say it in this, her first feature, if her enthusiasm for the language and possibilities of cinematic comedy seem to outweigh her grasp of tools and technique, she proves herself as someone to watch, as a conceptual artist and as a comedienne.
As SXSW 2009 approaches we’ll be asking filmmakers to spill the superficial details about their films, to tell us all the deep personal details of what makes them tick, and –– new this year! –– reveal who they had to sleep with, in the incestuous conspiracy-minded secret society that is the wider SXSW community, in order to get their film programmed at the festival.
Today we take a look at Creative Nonfiction, an Emerging Visions entry from Lena Dunham, who you might remember from Brandon’s Media Diet interview back in January, which was pegged to the debut of her very funny and still ongoing web series, Delusional Downtown Divas. Answering The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, Lena tells us about what 9 year old kids won’t let her get away with, and uses the phrase “boning Mark Ruffalo,” for which she has instantly won our hearts. The Nonfiction trailer is embedded above.
This review originally ran during the SXSW Film Festival. The Pleasure of Being Robbed opens in NY today and is available on IFC Video on Demand.
What a lark this film is, what a caustic joy! As with his shorts, Josh Safdie’s first feature film, The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, is too articulate a work to describe as whimsical, turning into a pejorative what would seem to be the best adjective with which to describe it. I could describe it as entirely unique, but then I couldn’t discuss its cinematic precedents, which are probably myriad but which I’d narrow down to the one that keeps springing to mind: Bresson.
It’s like nothing Bresson has ever made, but the entire film, with its heightened naturalism and precise spontaneity, seems possessed by Bresson’s notion of cinematography - not the lighting and photography, but the art of cinematography with which he delineated between those films that elevate the medium and those that are restrained by the trappings of the theater. I guess means that the best compliment I can pay Safdie is that his work makes film better. And it’s here that I feel the need to quote his own synopsis of the film, which ends with this quizzical postulation: “It’s a comedy?”
“Smart, absurd and heartwarmingly innocent, Joshua Safdie’s The Back of Her Head is a dessert short, that euphoriant treat that could in endless play still mesmerize with its sweetness and richness of story,” writes Noralil Ryan Fores at ShortEnd Magazine. The above clip “is in a way, a trailer for the film,” according to its YouTube synopsis.
This is as good an excuse as any for me to point you to redbucketfilms, the YouTube channel of Josh and Bennie Safdie and their filmmaking cohorts. There’s a bunch of stuff there: shorts, trailers, fragments, a minute of footage of Albert Maysles walking around an art gallery (and then, sitting and yawning epically) billed as “an observational documentary about a man at a party, who makes observational documentaries.” Etc.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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